


Berries

by sibley (ferns)



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Established Relationship, F/F, Fluff and Humor, Halloween, botanical facts, candy sorting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-06
Updated: 2018-08-06
Packaged: 2019-06-22 21:21:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15590979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferns/pseuds/sibley
Summary: It's the morning after Halloween, and all it takes is four words from Iris to flip Cindy's world upside down.





	Berries

Iris is exhausted. Halloween is not just a night for chaperoning kids while they go trick-or-treating (at least Jenna was well behaved, because Iris didn’t know _how_ she’d be able to rein in some of the rowdier kids they saw that night), it is also, unfortunately, a night for putting up with the Rogues insisting on committing themed crimes. All. Night. Long.

But she also promised yesterday that she’d help Cindy sort the tons of candy that they now have left over. And she can already see her going through it on the kitchen table. And since Iris kind of wants to not be alone in bed tonight, that means she’s going to help instead of waiting until the morning, which as she discovers when she checks the time on her phone is about an hour and forty-five minutes away, since it’s already 5:30.

“What are we keeping?” She asks, sighing as soon as she’s sitting down beside her girlfriend and no longer on her feet. Right now it looks like Cindy’s just finished sorting by color and is just now finally starting her actual flavor assessment.

Cindy looks up from her piles. Iris knows from years prior that she takes this stuff  _ very  _ seriously. She used to get in a competition with her dad over it and everything, because apparently they  _ do  _ have Halloween on Earth-19, and neither of them are particularly embarrassed about celebrating it as grown adults. “You can keep the peanut butter stuff, but we’re  _ not  _ keeping banana or pear flavored  _ anything.  _ All of the berry-flavored stuff is fine, though.”

And then Iris, after thinking on that statement for a second and remembering something Barry said once when he was younger, flips Cindy’s world upside-down. Four little words is all it takes.

“Cindy, bananas  _ are  _ berries.”

Dead silence while her girlfriend openly gapes at her, and then-“No. You’re lying. I  _ know  _ you’re lying.” Her voice cracks so the words come out like a squeak. “I know you’re lying to me. They’re not-no. No way.  _ No way,  _ Iris.”

Iris shrugs, a little amused, and rests her chin on her hands. “You can look it up if you don’t believe me. It’s was one of those weird facts Barry said all the time during that phase he went through where he did nothing  _ but  _ say weird facts. I think he was thirteen or so. The nature ones were his favorite by far.”

Slowly, Cindy goes back to her sorting, reluctantly including banana flavored things in her berry pile, glaring a little at Iris every time she does so. Iris takes and opens a peanut butter cup when Cindy scoots it across the table in a peace offering and asks, “Is anything  _ else  _ a berry that I don’t know about?”

“Grapes,” Iris offers, and Cindy chokes on air. “I remember that was another one.”

“Are  _ all  _ the worst candy flavors  _ berries?  _ Are they  _ all  _ trying to be included in my meticulous candy sorting?” Cindy demands, throwing her hands up in the air. “Does every fruit flavor want to be included in the ‘things I’m sending to my dads’ pile?! It’s not going to be a happy ending for them! What  _ other  _ terrible flavors are berries in disguise?”

Iris laughs a little and pulls out her phone to check. “Uh, let’s see… Tomatoes-”

“There’s no tomato flavored candy,” Cindy interrupts, getting up out of her chair to pace around. Maybe it’s just the late (early, technically?) hour, but something about that makes Iris laugh even louder. Maybe it’s because Cindy doesn’t usually do giant displays of emotion like this. Last time something like this happened, it was because it was… Oh. Five in the morning. Yeah, Iris gets it now. “Because that would be disgusting and horrible and terrible and an affront against everything that god stands for, just so you know.”

Iris makes the tactful decision not to bring up the fact that tomato flavored candy absolutely exists and, in her opinion after trying a little bit of it when Barry brought some back for her and Wally, tastes  _ horrible. _ Cindy might never recover from that information. Deciding to push her luck a little bit in a different way, Iris says, “Oranges are berries too, just so you know.”

Cindy wails and throws her hands up in the air again. “That’s terrible! Who  _ decided  _ this? Is there no order anymore?! I’m not even convinced that any of these things  _ are  _ berries. And if they are, they shouldn’t  _ really  _ be. They should be… They should be… Fake berries. Cursed berries. Or something. I don’t know.”

“If I’d known you were going to get so worked up, I wouldn’t have mentioned the banana thing.” Iris scrolls down a little on her phone, searching for even more ‘cursed berries’.

“You’d get worked up too if you just found out that your entire life is actually a lie,” Cindy groans, laying down on her back on the floor. “This sucks.”

“It’s not  _ that  _ bad. This won’t change how you live your life, will it?” Iris grabs another peanut butter cup. She’s lucky to have ended up with a girlfriend who despises them and is totally, one hundred percent willing to give all of them to her. Growing up, she had to share them with her whole family. “Nobody’s going to force you to change your life to adapt to the fact that bananas, oranges, tomatoes, grapes, and pomegranates are berries.”

“Pomegranates too?!” Cindy jumps to her feet and tangles her fingers in her hair like she does when she’s particularly overwhelmed. “This is a  _ nightmare,  _ Iris. A  _ nightmare.  _ How are they berries? They’re not even… Berry shaped. That’s a thing, right? Berry shaped?”

“Well, pomegranates  _ are  _ kind of shaped like how you’d think a berry would look, right?” Iris frowns. “Just bigger and fleshier and more leathery and without the texture you’d think a berry would have. Pomegranates feel like it’s okay for them to be berries. They can do that. Now, bananas and cucumbers, on the other hand-”

“Please, please don’t tell me that cucumbers are berries.” Cindy looks at Iris pleadingly. “Please. That’d be like spitting in the face of god.”

“...Sorry,” Iris says, and Cindy must be able to pick up on the message in her voice, because she storms over to her candy pile (which, honestly, Iris isn’t even sure how she got, because she was helping to take care of the Rogues all night. Maybe it was some kind of reward?) and fishes out a singular piece of cucumber candy from an unknown source and sets it down carefully on top of her berry candy pile.

“At least everything I thought was a berry before is still a berry, right?” Cindy asks cautiously. “If  _ cucumbers  _ and  _ grapes  _ and  _ bananas  _ can be berries, then anything can, right? So I don’t need to go back through this and take stuff out that I thought was a berry but wasn’t?”

“...Well,” Iris says slowly, reaching for another peanut butter cup, “as it turns out,  _ strawberries  _ aren’t actually berries-”

_ “What?!” _

**Author's Note:**

> I'm danteramon on tumblr.


End file.
